Sky Hopinka: Jaaji Approx. & I’ll Remember as You Were, not as What You’ll Become

Sky Hopinka’s work, Jaaji Approx., will be on view as part of Haunted Ethnography: new experimental documentary at UVP Everson from February 16 – March 25, 2017. Jaaji Approx. and an additional work, I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You’ll Become, will also be featured as part of the related indoor screening and talk on Thursday, March 9 in the Everson Museum’s Hosmer Auditorium.

Hopinka and the other participating artists, João Vieira Torres and Carl Elsaesser, will be in attendance to discuss their work following the screening.

About the Work

Jaaji Approx.2015
Runtime: 7 min. 36 sec.

From the artist’s statement:

Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of my father and videos gathered of the landscapes we have both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.

I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You’ll Become

2016
Runtime: 12 min. 32 sec.

From the artist’s statement:

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality, and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.

“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.

If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya

way ya hi ya way ya hi yo”

-Diane Burns (1957-2006)

About the Artist

Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. He was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and the facets of culture contained within. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images Festival, Courtisane Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and the LA Film Festival. He was awarded jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film Festival.

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